Multi-file byte comparison tool. What would you have done differently?

[Pelle]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:43:27 +0200, Kai Meyer <kai at unixlords.com> wrote:

> On 08/05/2011 03:02 AM, Pelle wrote:
>>
>> Don't declare variables until you need them, just leave bytes_read and
>> bytes_max here.
>>
> Is there a performance consideration? Or is it purely a style or  
> D-Factor suggestion?

Just style and D-factor :-)

Also, resulting code is shorter, and you can replace a lot of type names  
with auto.

>> I don't understand why you use ByteUnion instead of just a plain array
>> of bytes.
> I thought that comparing one byte at a time would be slower than  
> comparing 8 bytes at a time (size_t on 64bit) and failing over to the  
> byte-by-byte comparison only when the size_t value was different.

Maybe, but that's something that should be benchmarked. If a byte array is  
just as fast, and the code is simpler, that's a better solution :)